1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display (“LCD”) and a method of driving the same, and more particularly, to an LCD and a method of driving the same capable of improving display characteristics.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, a liquid crystal display (“LCD”) includes an LCD panel having a plurality of gate lines and a plurality of data lines, a gate driving circuit for supplying a gate driving signal to the plurality of gate lines, and a data driving circuit for supplying a data signal to the plurality of data lines. The LCD panel includes a lower substrate having pixel electrodes formed thereon, an upper substrate having a common electrode formed thereon, and a liquid crystal layer interposed therebetween. Voltage is applied between the electrodes to rearrange liquid crystal molecules in the liquid crystal layer and adjust transmissivity of light transmitted by the liquid crystal layer. The LCD panel is further formed with red R, green G, and blue B pixels, so that the pixels are driven by signals applied through the gate lines and the data lines to thereby display an image.
However, as the resolution of the LCD becomes higher, an aperture ratio of the LCD panel is reduced and thus luminance is degraded. To solve this problem, a PenTile pixel structure has been proposed. In the PenTile pixel structure, a blue unit pixel is shared to display two dots, and adjacent blue unit pixels receive a data signal from one data driving circuit and are driven by different gate driving circuits from each other. Furthermore, in order to further improve the luminance, an RGBW scheme has been proposed in which a white W pixel is provided in addition to red R, green G, and blue B pixels.
In recent years, a gate driving circuit is formed directly on an LCD panel to reduce a total size of the LCD and improve the productivity thereof. Thus, even when the resolution of the LCD panel increases, the number of stages constituting the gate driving circuit can be adjusted appropriately to deal with the increased resolution. However, a data driving circuit is mounted on the LCD panel in the form of a chip which is already made, so that it cannot properly deal with a change in the resolution of the LCD panel. In order to overcome this problem, a selection unit is provided between the data driving circuit and the LCD panel. The selection unit connects one channel of the data driving circuit and a plurality of data lines, and transfers a data signal supplied from the channel to the plurality of data lines at a time interval. Accordingly, pixels on a row selected by a gate driving signal supplied from the gate driving circuit are turned on, and the data signal from the data driving circuit is supplied to the four RGBW pixels sequentially via the selection unit at a time interval, whereby an image is displayed.